In the animal kingdom sexual Jealousy and rivalry play so important a part that Darwin attributes to their agency the superior size and strength (in most classes) of the male over the female. Among savages, as has been pointed out, we see sometimes a curious absence of Jealousy, both as regards brides and wives; whereas in other cases, the passion manifests itself with brutal ferocity. Thus among the American Indians infidelity is sometimes punished by cutting off the nose, sometimes by the shearing of the hair, which is considered a great disgrace. On the Fiji Islands, Waitz tells us, the wives of a polygamist “lead a life of bitter strife and commit ... the most atrocious cruelties against one another from hate and Jealousy; biting or cutting off the nose is quite a common occurrence.” Stanley, in his work on the Congo, remarks that the Langa-Langa women scar their faces and busts in a hideous manner, probably because compelled to do so by the Jealousy of the men. In Hebrew literature the case of Jacob’s two wives urging him of their own accord to become still further polygamous, presents a strange example of this passion being neutralised by other motives. What prompted the ancient Greeks, and what prompts Oriental nations to this day, to keep their women under lock and key, was, and is, of course, simply a perverse and ignorant feeling of Jealousy. In this feeling also, no doubt, originated the Chinese custom compelling women to mutilate their feet to prevent them from going about; as well as the custom indulged in until recently by Japanese ladies of shaving off their eyebrows and blackening their teeth after marriage—a custom which shows how much stronger Jealousy must be than Admiration of Personal Beauty in the affection of these nations. No doubt, however, all these excesses and cruelties of Jealousy are counter-balanced by the good it has done in enforcing the laws of morality.
Civilisation does not weaken sexual Jealousy, but only gives it a less brutal form of manifesting itself. Conjugal Jealousy still produces the greatest number of domestic tragedies, of which Othello is the immortal type. It is already typified in Hera, for, as Zeus says in Homer, “She is always meddling, whatever I may be about.” But then she had good cause to meddle in the affairs of this Olympian Don Juan.
Lovers’ Jealousy.—As for Lovers’ Jealousy proper, there is reason to believe that it will grow stronger and more common as general culture advances. For the men who are most ahead of our century emotionally, the men of genius, are usually very jealous. Heine’s Jealousy went so far that he even poisoned a poor parrot of whom his Mathilde was extravagantly fond; and it is probable that Byron’s savage attack on the Waltz was dictated by a sort of wholesale Jealousy in regard to all pretty girls. For in Love Byron was omnivorous.
The lover’s and the husband’s Jealousy are alike in their extreme sensitiveness—
nor is there probably any difference in the intenseness of their agony.
To the lover Jealousy is not only his greatest torture, but also his deadliest enemy. With this fever in his blood even the man of the world who knows his “Ars Amoris” by heart, is apt to ruin his cause by excess of blind rivalry and clumsy passion: which perhaps explains why so many great men have been refused by their best loves. To endure and ignore a rival is, as Ovid already declared, the highest and most difficult achievement in the Art of Love; as for himself, he frankly admits, he was unequal to it.
There are several ways in which lovers ruin their chances by awkward excess of passion. It makes them appear selfish and unamiable; and the pallor which Jealousy inspires is not that which makes a girl consider a man “interesting,” and leads her through pity to Love. If the lover is not yet accepted, his Jealousy arouses her opposition, because he seems to take it for granted that he has a right to be jealous, and that she will necessarily accept him. Again, his attitude repels her by suggesting that he would indulge in impertinent supervision and tyrannical dictation after marriage. Even if he has successfully proposed, she does not like to have him make his victory and prospective ownership so conspicuous by his jealous glances and manœuvres. Besides, a fascinating girl likes to preserve her apparent freedom as long as possible, and let others admire her beauty while it lasts.
Most fatal is it for a man to assume a jealous attitude towards a woman before he has been able to inspire her with interest in him. Her indifference will thus be inevitably changed into positive dislike. For, as Madame de Coulanges says, “L’on ne veut de la jalousie que de ceux dont on pourrait être jalouse”—We do not desire any jealousy except from those for whom we could ourselves feel jealousy. Stendhal, who quotes this aphorism, adds a reason why women may be gratified by a display of Jealousy: “Jealousy may please proud women, as a new way of showing them their power.” And to a woman in love and in doubt, the man’s Jealousy, which is so easily detected, is of course a most welcome symptom of conquest.
For Jealousy is the first sign of Love, as it is also the last. If a man is in doubt whether he is really in Love with a girl or only admires her beauty, let him observe her when talking or dancing with another man: if he then feels “queer”—from a mere uneasiness to a desire to pulverise the other fellow—he may be assured that his emotion has passed the borderline which separates disinterested æsthetic admiration from the desire for exclusive possession which is popularly known as Love.
Conversely, if a man who has been repeatedly refused, or who for some other reason endeavours to suppress his passion, feels in doubt whether the cure is complete, he need only imagine his former love in the arms of another man, or before the altar with him: if that does not make him turn pale and frown and bite his lips, he is cured. This test, however, is not so certain as the other, for sometimes Jealousy outlives Love; and Longfellow believed that every true passion leaves an eternal scar.
Like Coyness, Jealousy is a discord in the harmony of Love. A little of it is piquant and rouses desire. “Jealousy,” says Hume, “is a painful passion, yet without some share of it the agreeable affection of love has difficulty to subsist in all its force and violence.... Jealousy and absence in love compose the dolce piccante of the Italians, which they suppose so essential to all pleasure.”
Unfortunately, Jealousy is rarely content to remain “agreeably piquant,” but is apt to grow into a tornado of passion which devastates body and soul, and makes it the keenest agony known to mankind. It is often said that the agony inspired by a refusal is the only thing that excuses tears in a man. This agony is a mixed emotion, including wounded Pride and the sense of having lost all that makes life worth living. But its keenest sting comes from the green-eyed monster, who hisses into the lover’s ears that now a rival will enjoy her sweetness and beauty. Dante did not correctly describe the lowest depth of hell: it is this thought in the lover’s mind that “now another will marry her.” It is that thought which drives lovers to lunatic asylums and suicide.
“Some lines I read the other day,” Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne, "are continually ringing a peal in my ears—
“Get thee to a nunnery,” would be every lover’s advice to the girl who rejected him. If she obeyed, his agony would be diminished one-half.
But why, if he cannot have her, should she not make some one else happy? Because Jealousy is the one absolutely selfish trait of Love. The lover who in other respects is the very model of altruism and Self-Sacrifice is in point of jealous rivalry for possession an absolute egotist to whom even her happiness is torture if he cannot share it. Is this an aberration of Lovers’ Sympathy, or does it mark its climax? The answer will be found in the chapter on Sympathy.
Retrospective and Prospective Jealousy.—There are three kinds of modern Jealousy—Retrospective, Present, and Prospective. The rejected lover’s Jealousy is of the third kind; it refers not to what is, but to what will or may be. Another variety of Prospective Jealousy is illustrated by a story told in a Moscow journal of an old peasant who married a young girl of whom he was very jealous. On his deathbed he expressed a desire to give her a last kiss. But hardly had she touched him, when he seized her under lip and fastened his teeth so tightly in it that a knife had to be used to pry them open. With his dying breath he confessed that his object had been to mutilate her, so that no one else might marry her.
Is it not possible that the custom of burning widows in India was at first an outcome of the Jealousy of some influential ruler who set the fashion?
Present Jealousy does not call for any special remarks, but Retrospective Jealousy has some curious features. It is entirely non-existent not only among those savage tribes who scorn virgin brides, but among some semi-civilised peoples in Africa and Asia where the men prefer to marry women with a dowry, no matter how they may have earned it.
In modern love Retrospective Jealousy is often very strong, especially in men who, though they do not hesitate to marry a girl who has been engaged before, would not care to dwell on the details of the previous engagement. Women, too, have been known to indulge in this futile form of Jealousy. Thus Heine relates in one of his letters that at the special request of his Mathilde, he got her a copy of the French edition of his Pictures of Travel. “But hardly had she read a few pages, when she turned deadly pale, trembled in all her limbs, and begged me for heaven’s sake to close the book. She had come upon a love-scene in it, and jealous as she is, she does not even want me to have adored another before her régime; indeed, I had to promise her that in future I would not address any language of love even to the imaginary ideal personages in my books.”
The trouble with Heine is that one never knows exactly when he is relating facts and when indulging in fun and fiction. As a rule, certainly women are not much troubled by Jealousy regarding the past. If the lover promises to be a good boy in future and give them a monopoly of his adoration, they are rarely disquieted by the question, “Has he been in love before?” Indeed, there is a current notion that women admire a man all the more for being a Don Juan or professional lady-killer. Perhaps, however, this is putting the cart before the horse: for, instead of admiring him because he is a lady-killer, is it not possible that he is a lady-killer because they all admire him?
Yet some truth there seems to be in that old notion regarding gay Lotharios; for the average woman’s ideal man still wears a certain mediæval military cast: he is conceived as a muscular dare-devil, reckless, irresistible, a universal conqueror of female hearts as well as of other fortresses.
Jealousy and Beauty.—As Love becomes more and more idealised, i.e. transferred to the imagination, its overtones combine and produce various new emotional clang-tints—sometimes agreeable, sometimes harsh and dissonant. Among the Japanese and Chinese, as just stated, Jealousy neutralises the Admiration of Personal Beauty to such an extent as to breed indifference to shaved eyebrows, black teeth, deformed feet, and a consequent utter absence of grace in gait. But there is a more subtle way in which Jealousy may cast a cloud on Personal Admiration, even in a refined Western imagination. Once in a while it happens to a sensitive man, a worshipper of Beauty, that he beholds a vision of grace and loveliness—perhaps in a ballroom, perhaps in a theatre or the street. But this sight instead of delighting him, gives him a painful sting in the heart. Partly, this paradoxical sadness of a discoverer may be due to the sudden fancy that this fairylike being perhaps will never again cross his field of vision. Yet it seems more likely that the tinge of pain which o’ercasts the rosy feelings of Admiration is due to Jealousy, especially if she is seen in company with a man. For a moment the Beauty-worshipper fancies himself in that man’s place; the next moment the consciousness of isolation flashes on his mind, and the reaction brings out the painful contrast between what is and what might be. For man, as Mr. Howells has remarked, is still imperfectly monogamous. He has occasional visions of a Mahometan heaven peopled with black-eyed Houris; or envies the knight in Heine’s poem, who lies on the beach and enjoys the caresses of the mermaids, who come and kiss him because they know not that he only pretends to be asleep.
That the Beauty-worshipper’s sadness is due to a vague Jealousy seems the more probable from the fact that the same feeling never tinges his admiration of a living Apollo of masculine perfection. Whether women ever have the same emotions remains for them to tell.
In the case of this trait of Love, PriorityPriority of discovery obviously belongs to the author of these lines—
Monopoly, the imperious desire for exclusive devotion and possession, is the mother of Jealousy. Though less grim and melancholy than her son, she is equally presumptuous and meddlesome, and woe to the man who will so much as breathe or smile upon what she claims as hers. Monopoly, like Jealousy, is one of the selfish elements of Love. All lovers join hands and declaim in unison the words of Jean Paul: “What pleases us is to see her shrink from everybody else, growing hard and frozen to them on our account, handing them nothing but ices and cold pudding, but serving us with the glowing goblet of love.”
Historically, Monopoly is of the utmost significance, since in it is rooted monogamy, which, as previously explained, probably originated in exogamous Capture giving a man the right to exclusive possession of one woman in communities where, as one writer puts it, every man might claim “a thousand miles of wives.”
The desire for exclusiveness, for undivided worship, sometimes enters into non-sexual affections; and an anonymous writer has suggested that the main reason why Byron was so devoted to his dog was because the dog was “a creature exclusively devoted to himself, and hostile to every one else.”
Yet all this is child’s play compared with the imperious form Monopoly assumes in Modern Romantic Love. In the fever-heat of his passion the lover’s chief desire is to be cast on a desert island, and remain there all alone with her. “On ne se soucie plus de ce que dit le monde,” says Pascal; public opinion is scorned; all social feelings annihilated. Relatives and friends exist no longer—what are they to him? his pet occupations bore him; and there is only one thought which fascinates—the picture of a small and cosy house, all his own, a small parlour with one sofa, barely large enough for two, a book of poems in very fine print, compelling two heads to touch in reading from it, and a breakfast-table with only two chairs; all visitors excluded from the unsocial atmosphere, because “three are a crowd.” ’Tis a “double selfishness,” doubly as strong as single selfishness.
Surely Emerson—as the German professor did with the camel—evolved his idea of a lover from his inner consciousness. “All mankind love a lover,” he exclaims. Obviously he had never seen a lover. The fact is that all the world thinks a lover a tremendous and ridiculous bore—a man whose whole mind is monopolised by one unvarying topic—her perfections and his chances of winning her; and who stubbornly insists on monopolising your attention, too, with that everlasting exclusive topic. Like every other lunatic he has one fixed idea; and it’s no wonder the poets always paint him blind, like Cupid; for on the wide, wide ocean of humanity, he sees nothing with his two big eyes but one little solitary transient bubble.
In this matter, it must be admitted, woman’s Love is superior to man’s. “Oh, Arthur,” says Ella, in the Fliegende Blätter, “how happy I would be alone with you on a quiet island in the distant ocean!” “Have you any other desire, dearest Ella?” “Oh yes, do get me a season ticket for the opera.”
True Love is transient.—Boswell tells us that Johnson “laughed at the notion that a man can never be really in love but once, and considered it a mere romantic fancy.” And though this romantic fancy is as current as ever in society and literature, Johnson was right in his verdict, as usual.
True Love, indeed, is absolutely exclusive of every other Love while it lasts; but it rarely lasts more than two or three years; and then the heart, freed from one monopoly, is ready for another, perhaps even more tyrannical, while it lasts.
That Love is transient is most fortunate, for it is, in its truest and most ardent form, such a consuming fever, that the strongest man would not be able to endure its mingled ecstasies and anguish more than a few years. The lover’s fancies are his only food; coarser nourishment he scorns; he loses his appetite, and becomes “pale and interesting”—to women, who like to see a powerful man thus wincing under their superior might, and melting away before their radiant beauty.
Yet its transitoriness detracts not in the least from the magic and the charm of Love. It is in the life of man what the flowering period is in the life of a plant. As, for the sake of its fragrant blossoms, a plant is tenderly nursed and watered weeks and months though it flowers but a week; so, even if brief Love were the only flower of life, yet would life be worth living for its sake alone.
How long Love may last depends on individuals and circumstances. Sainte-Beuve, I believe, has said that it never can outlive five years. Favouring circumstances are slight obstacles, rivalries and jealousies, short absences, etc.; while long absences, the distractions of travel, professional occupations, etc., tend to shorten it. In uninterrupted absence, without epistolary encouragement, the most ardent Love would hardly survive a year, unless the lover lived on a desert island, with no other woman to engross his attention. Return, however, is apt to bring on a relapse, as with Henry Esmond, who “went away from his mistress, and was cured a half-dozen times; he came back to her side, and instantly fell ill again of the fever.”
Thus it is the fate of all unrequited Love to die for want of food; or, if successful, to leave the stormy ocean of passion and sail into the more tranquil haven of conjugal affection.
Woman’s Love is less transient than man’s, because there are fewer ambitions to neutralise it.
Is First Love best?—If Love’s Monopoly lasted for life, if passion were not transient, it would follow that most men would marry, or endeavour to marry, the schoolgirls who were the first object of their amorous attentions. But is there one man in a hundred, is there one in three hundred, who marries his first Love? Cases are known of men of genius who fell in love at an age varying from six to nine years; and there are few lads, in America at any rate, and if they have an artistic temperament, who do not have their cases of “calf-love,” beginning with their tenth or twelfth year.
A boy’s first Love is a girl of about his own age, towards whom he shyly makes his way by offering her an apple, a bunch of wild strawberries, or a large hailstone picked up during a storm before her eyes, to impress her with his reckless Gallantry and courage. The second and third loves—for schoolboys are fickle, and schoolgirls more so—are probably not different in character from the first. At fifteen and sixteen, boys scorn girls of their own age, and fall in love with young married women, Troubadour-like. Perhaps the Dulcinea is a Spanish beauty, with large thrilling black eyes, who, seeing the poor cub’s infatuation, teases and tortures him to distraction with her unfathomable wealth of fascination.
And let no one imagine that these cases of early passion are anything short of true Romantic Love. For follow that poor boy enamoured of the Spanish brunette; see him hiding himself in a lonely forest, gazing with rapture on her photograph—perhaps only with his mind’s eye—throwing himself on the ground in an anguish of tears, wishing that either he was dead ... or her husband ... and behaving altogether like a premature Werther.
Such is calf—beg pardon—first Love. And is this first Love best of all? Perhaps, in one respect, and in one only: it believes in its own unchangeableness. Goethe remarks in his autobiography that nothing is so calculated to make us disgusted with life “as a return of Love.... The notion of the eternal and infinite, which forms its basis and support, is destroyed; it appears to us transitory, like everything that recurs.”
Heine on First Love.—Heinrich Heine, whose poetry is next to Shakspere’s the most valuable depository of Modern Love, enlarges on this question in his fragmentary but admirable Analysis of Shakspere’s Female Characters: "Love is a flickering flame between two darknesses ... [the dots are in the original]. Whence comes it?... From sparks incredibly small.... How does it end?... In nothingness equally incredible.... The more raging the flame, the sooner it is burnt out.... Yet that does not prevent it from abandoning itself entirely to its fiery impulses, as if this flame were to burn eternally....
"Alas, when we are seized a second time in life by the grand passion, we lack this faith in its immortality, and painful memories tell us that in the end it will consume itself. Hence the melancholy by which second differs from first love.... In first love we fancy our passion can only end with death; and indeed, if the threatening difficulties in our way cannot be removed in any other manner, we readily make up our mind to accompany our beloved to the grave.... But in second love the thought occurs to us that time will change our wildest and most ecstatic feelings to a tame, apathetic state; that these eyes, these lips, these contours, which now throw us into transports of rapture, will some day be regarded with indifference. This thought, alas! is more melancholy than a presentiment of death.... It is a disconsolate feeling, in the midst of intoxication, to think of the sober, frigid moments that will follow, and to know from experience that these ultra-poetic, heroic passions will have such a lamentably prosaic ending....
“I do not, in the least, presume to find fault with Shakspere, yet cannot but express my surprise that he makes Romeo enamoured of Rosaline before he brings him face to face with Juliet. Though absolutely devoted to his second love, there yet dwells in his soul a certain scepticism, which finds utterance in ironic expressions, and not rarely reminds one of Hamlet. Or is second love the stronger in a man for the very reason that it is paired with lucid self-consciousness? A woman cannot love twice, her nature is too tender to endure a second time the terrific emotional earthquake. Look at Juliet! Would she be able a second time to endure those ecstatic delights and horrors, a second time suppress her fear and empty the dreadful cup? In my opinion once is enough for this poor, blessed creature, this pure martyr to a great passion.”
First Love is not best.—Thus even Heine, while lamenting the transitoriness of Love, cannot help suggesting that in man, at any rate, second Love may be stronger than first. On this point it is curious to note the difference of opinion among thoughtful writers. La Bruyère declares that “we can love well once only—the first time; the loves which follow are less involuntary.” Another French author, Letourneau, on the contrary, thinks that one love-affair only whets the appetite for more: “on a besoin de vivre fort;” and hence “an expiring passion ordinarily leaves the ground admirably prepared for the germination of another passion.” Stendhal held that a young girl of eighteen, “owing to her inadequate experience of life, is not comprehensive enough in her desires to be able to love with as much passion as a woman of twenty-eight;”twenty-eight;” and a lady-friend having objected to this on the ground that in her first love a girl must love more ardently because her feelings are not distracted by doubt and distrust, as they are subsequently, he replied that this very méfiance, in its struggle with love, will make it come out a thousand times more brilliant and substantial than the gay and thoughtless first love.”love.” Mr. P. G. Hamerton seems to cast his vote in the same urn, for he thinks, “it is, indeed, one of the signs of a healthy nature to retain for many years the freshness of the heart which makes one liable to fall in love, as a healthy palate retains the natural early taste for delicious fruits.” And, finally, George Eliot asks: “How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy’s flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.”
So doctors evidently disagree. But the facts that Heine is in doubt, that the greatest authority makes Romeo’s unparalleled passion his second love, and that even Werther’s famous love, notwithstanding Goethe’s theory, is not his first, certainly make the scale incline in favour of a second or later passion.
These last two lines suggest the whole psychology of First Love. Romeo’s first Love was not his best Love. When his soul had reached manly maturity, and looked about for a proper object of affection, he did not at once have the good luck to encounter his Juliet. Rosaline was the nearest approach to his ideal; so he worked himself into a semi-fictitious passion and groaned for her, and would die, until suddenly he saw his real ideal, and found that his first passion was a fragile soap-bubble in comparison to his true Love for Juliet, which no rival could have altered one speck.
In his first Love, in a word, he had fallen in love with the species, rather than with an individual. Sexual Selection, or Individual Preference, had come in more as a matter of chance than of decisive, final choice. And so it is with most cases of first love. Man falls in Love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man or woman. Thus it is that at an early age thousands of impatient youths marry their Rosalines before they have had time or opportunity to meet their Juliets. Doubtless there is a Juliet for every man in the world; but it generally happens that she does not attend the same school, work in the same manufactory, or live in the same village, or belong to the same city-clique as he does; so, being less adventurous than Romeo, who went outside of his clique for a sort of exogamous marriage by Capture, he weds his first Love, i.e. his Rosaline; and this is one of the reasons why so few cases of true Romantic Love are encountered even to-day, outside of novels.
Most marriages, in truth, are brought about through accidental acquaintance or companionship, not through Love. Suppose that a score of young men who have never loved were cast on a desert island with one pretty girl. Though she were as unamiable as Juno, cold and coy as Diana, in less than a month nineteen of the twenty youths would be in love with her and bitter personal enemies. Here the man would fall in love with the woman; the fundamental tone of passion would prevail; whereas if there had been a choice, eighteen of those men perhaps would never have dreamed of proposing to that girl. Now second Love is much more apt to be thus influenced by Individual Preference than first; and the more Love is individualised the deeper it is. Failure to find lasting satisfaction in the first choice makes a man more slow and cautious in his second choice.
At the same time the mind expands and grows, and age strengthens not only the intellect but the emotions as well. For his size, a boy may love as ardently as a man; but the man is bigger.
The history of the race agrees with that of the individual in showing that Love at first is a general passion, only slightly discriminative, but becomes more and more so as time goes on.
Even the objection urged against second Love by Goethe and Heine appears of no special significance when brought face to face with facts. Very few men, if any, who are in Love a second or third time, sit in a corner to muse over the transitoriness of passion till they become “disgusted with life.” On the contrary, they feel convinced that the preceding infatuation was, after all, not real indomitable Love, such as they now experience towards Daisy No. 2; which second infatuation they absolutely know is the genuine article; just as they know that no one ever before loved so deeply and devotedly. This naïve self-confidence of the lover in the unprecedented ardour and uniqueness of his passion is one of the most sublime and ridiculous aspects of Love.
And here it may be said, for the benefit of timid souls who may possibly fear that harm may result to the cause of Love from exposing its perishableness, that the only persons who could be injured by the destruction of this illusion—those who happen to be in Love—will positively and absolutely refuse to believe that their particular passion is fugitive. They will simply laugh in the face of any one who questions the immortality of their Love; and a year or two later, perhaps, they will laugh again—for a different reason.
Indeed, the notion that true Love never dies and will for ever monopolise the soul, may actually do harm, and sometimes does so. The disappointed lover commits suicide not because his torments seem intolerable for the moment, but because he is convinced they will last for ever, and thus make life not worth living.
A review of the situation brings out the truth that the only apparent advantage which First Love has over later passions is Novelty. Yet even this advantage proves to be illusory; for though the Second Love may not be a novelty, the Girl is; and does not Moore, the modern Anakreon, sing—
One more consideration. There is an adage, not entirely unknown, that practice makes perfect; and psychology teaches that feelings tend to become deeper by repetition. Why should Love be an exception? The channels worn in the brain by the first emotions will be reopened and widened by the new flood of passion; and thus remembered emotion will add its force to that of the present moment.
Has the reader ever heard Wagner’s Nibelung Tetralogy? If so, he will remember with what a thrill of delight he recognised in the later dramas some of the motives and melodies he had heard in the preceding ones. In the later dramas these melodies are appreciated not only for their own intrinsic beauty, but because they come laden with the sad and joyous associations and memories of the preceding scenes which they illustrated.
Wagner was not only a great musician and dramatist, he was also a most subtle psychologist. He doubled the power of music by adding to the enjoyment of the moment the strong current of remembered emotion. And this is precisely what a later passion of manhood adds to the naïve delights of First Love.
It is remarkable how many analogies there are between Music and Love—the youngest art and the youngest sentiment; and how the love of the divine art enables one to understand and feel more deeply the music of the divine passion.
Jealousy and Monopoly are the two selfish features of Love which urge an enamoured couple to flee society and friends, and take refuge on a desert island. Fortunately there is in the chemistry of Love a third selfish element—the Pride of successful wooing, which commonly is strong enough to neutralise the antisocial tendencies of the other two. If a lover’s passion has not yet risen to fever-heat, nothing (except Jealousy) will so suddenly raise it as the Pride and conceit inspired by noticing that people in general admire his chosen girl; the more of the admirers, the greater his Pride. And if, in addition, sympathising friends directly approve his choice and laud her merits in detail, then his transports of ecstasy become celestial.
Inasmuch as in moments of elation over success of any kind a man feels as if nothing were beyond his power, an accepted lover is as proud (I suppose) as if he had conquered not only one girl, but the whole feminine kingdom—or queendom: for surely the one chosen by him is the cleverest and most beautiful of all; whence it follows that all the inferior ones would of course have been only too proud if he had condescended to pay his addresses to them.
Why do great men so often marry women who are not especially attractive as to personal appearance, when often they might have had their choice among a group of beauties? Because the spoiled beauties did not understand the art of flattery, sincere or otherwise. Every man wishes to be considered either a creative genius or a hero. The woman who knows how to touch the sympathetic chord, to make each one’s particular kind of Pride vibrate, has him at her feet in an instant.
In conjugal life the most ludicrous of all sights is the royal self-complacency with which a man accepts the eager worship of his wife.
Conversely, a rejected lover’s heart bleeds from so many wounds that it is difficult to count them; but of all these wounds the one inflicted by the jealous thought that she will now marry another is alone deep as that of his offended Pride. The sense of superiority which every man feels over every other man is crushed, and cannot be laid as a flattering unction to the soul. Hence a girl who refuses a proposal and does not at least keep it a secret, is not only quite as mean, but a thousand times more cruel than a man who will “kiss and tell.”
Coquetry.—Yet of all secrets the compliment of an offer is the hardest for a woman to keep; so, in strictest confidence, she tells it to only one solitary person, who ditto, who ditto, who ditto, etc. etc. etc. etc. and so on.
There is a class of women whose sole pleasure in life appears to be derived from vanity gratified by offers of Love and Marriage. Of all the elements of Love—and there are at least eleven—her soul is affected by one alone—the overtone of Pride. The Coquette has already been superficially examined, and distinguished from the Flirt. But this is the place where she must be placed under the microscope and more closely examined. A great many distinguished observers have dissected her, and here are a few of their discoveries.
Congreve lets her off easily—
Fielding is less lenient: “The life of a coquette is one constant lie.” “The coquette,” says Mr. T. B. Aldrich—"all’s one to her; above her fan she’d make sweet eyes at Caliban." According to Victor Hugo, “God created the coquette as soon as He had made the fool;” and Byron asks, “What careth she for hearts when once possessed?” When Moore wrote—
he had evidently just left the chill atmosphere of a coquette. “A coquette,” says A. Duprey, “is more occupied with the homage we withhold than with that which we bestow upon her.” “Coquettes are the quacks of love,” says Rochefoucauld. “Heartlessness and fascination, in about equal proportions, constitute,” according to Mme. Deluzy, “the receipt for forming the character of a coquette.” And Poincelot caps the climax: “An asp would render its sting more venomous by dipping it into the heart of a coquette.”
There are masculine as well as feminine Coquettes; but there is one striking difference between them. To the female Coquette all is game that gets into her net; she will turn away from a man of genius, an Apollo, already at her feet, to fascinate a rough and freckled country lad at first sight; whereas a male Coquette rarely wastes his powder on a girl who isn’t pretty. And even herein is seen the superiority of man’s Love to woman’s. The male Coquette is actuated by Admiration of Beauty as well as by Pride; the female Coquette by Pride alone.
Cannibals have a quaint old custom of eating certain parts of a formidable enemy’s body, in the belief that they will thus inherit his qualities,—as by eating his tongue, his eloquence; his heart, his courage. What a delicious gastronomic morsel a Coquette’s heart would be to these savages, whose principal amusement is cruelty!
Perhaps the best description ever given of a Coquette is Thackeray’s portraiture of Beatrix—"A woman who has listened to" her admirers, “and played with them and laughed with them,—who, beckoning them with lures and caresses, and with Yes smiling from her eyes, has tricked them on to their knees, and turned her back and left them.”
Love and Rank.—Not so many years ago the newspapers of a certain European country made a great deal of ado about a forthcoming marriage between a blue-blooded youth and a ditto maiden, for the reason that it was “a real Love-match.” Poor princes! so rarely are they allowed to choose their own Juliet, they who are supposed to be the rulers of the land. Until quite recently, it is true, public opinion on the Continent sanctioned a Love-marriage between an aristocrat and a non-aristocrat provided it was unlawful, i.e. morganatic, a special royal euphemy for bigamy; but now even this privilege is abolished, and princes can marry one of equal rank only, in pursuance of a custom more tyrannical, more restrictive than the parental command on which marriage-unions depended in ancient and mediæval times.
German novelists have made considerable progress in their art in recent years, but in one respect it seems to be very difficult for them to substitute realism for romance. In every love story, almost, one of the leading characters must be either a prince or a princess. As if it were not the very essence of a prince and a princess that they shall not be allowed to love and marry for Love—unless they are clever enough to fall in Love with the partner singled out for them, which happens once in a hundred times, perhaps.
But it is not only in the highest circles that aristocratic Pride is opposed to free Sexual Selection. It extends through a hundred scales of the social ladder. Germany presents a remarkable example. The metaphysician Eduard von Hartmann credits the government of that country with great astuteness. Not having much money to pay its officials, it has established a legion of distinctions of rank and titles, for the sake of which the officials are quite willing to forego a larger salary. Of the ludicrous conceit inspired by this distinction of having even the slightest kind of a “handle” to their name, I can give an amusing instance from my own experience. Some years ago, desiring to see the Intendant, or Manager, of the Munich Opera-house, I entered a little room, marked Portier, and found that gentleman comfortably seated, with his cap on. He took my card, on which there was no “handle” of any sort, and replied sternly, “The Intendant is in; I will send up your card;” adding, more severely still, “And, young man, let me tell you, that when you come into the presence of a royal official, it behoves you to remove your hat!”
Harmless as such childish vanity may seem, it is yet one of the reasons why there are fewer good-looking women in Germany than in most European countries—France always excepted. For a girl, whose father wears on his coat the order of the black eagle, to marry a young man whose father only has the order of the green eagle, would be considered an unpardonable mésalliance, and would scandalise the whole neighbourhood. Of course it does not make much difference in a woman’s own looks whether she marries a man she loves or one whom she can barely tolerate, and who is forced on her by parental desire and public opinion, but it does make a difference with her children; and even in her own case, is it not self-evident that the smile of pleasure at being happily married is a better preservative of youthful beauty than the constant frown of disappointment, perhaps of disgust?
The highest treason against Cupid, however, is committed by those American women, who, without the excuse of inherited custom, come to Europe with their money to marry a baron. Fortunately such marriages have almost always ended so wretchedly that the fashion has somewhat lost its popularity. What is a baron? Perhaps a man whose great-great-great-grandfather “lent” some duke or king a few thousand gold pieces, in return for which he was allowed to place “von” or “de” before his name. And on the strength of this little word the family Pride has gone on steadily increasing through various generations—or rather, degenerations.
Physiology is not usually considered an ironic science, but it cannot help writing a satire when it teaches that “blue” blood is venous blood, charged with the waste products of the bodily tissues. How much better than this irony would iron be, i.e. some fresh, red, arterial blood infused in the bodies of the Continental aristocracy. The English aristocracy, on the other hand, presents one of the finest types of manhood and womanhood; and the reason is suggested by Darwin: “Many persons are convinced, as appears to me with justice, that our aristocracy, including under this term all wealthy families in which primogeniture has long prevailed, from having chosen during many generations from all classes the more beautiful women as their wives, have become handsomer, according to the European standard, than the middle classes.”
Vivid as the feeling of pride must be in a man of humble origin who has succeeded in winning the Love of a woman of a higher social grade; and greatly as a Coquette must be tickled in counting off the number of hearts offered to her, on her fingers if she has enough to go round: yet the climax of Lover’s Pride, it seems to me, must be reached by a man of noble birth who, scorning mediæval puerilities, marries the girl who has won his heart, and were she but a plump, rosy-cheeked peasant girl. This vivid feeling was doubtless realised by the Grand Duke of Austria when he married Philippine Welser, by the Duke of Bavaria when he married Maria Pettenbeck.
Thanks to the social instinct, our pains are halved, our pleasures doubled, if we can share them with others. The proverb that misery loves company expresses only half the truth; happiness, too, loves company. The late King of Bavaria used to enjoy an opera most if he was the sole spectator in the house; but most persons would lose half their pleasure in this way. Nor is this a purely imaginary feeling; for in a successful performance there are moments when the intensely-silent and universal absorption seems to raise a magnetic wave, which crosses the house and makes all nerves vibrate and thrill in unison. Again, if a man whom constant attendance at places of amusement has rendered blasé, happens to sit next to a young girl who visits the theatre for the first time, the emotional play of her features, by reviving the memory of his first experiences, enables him to share her feelings sympathetically, and thus to enjoy the performance doubly. And is it not a universal experience that if we witness sublime or beautiful scenes—if we approach the Niagara Falls in a small boat from below, or if, standing on the top of the Breithorn near Zermatt, we see almost the whole of Switzerland and the Tyrol, parts of France and Italy, down to Lago Maggiore, at the same moment—almost our first thought is, “Oh, if So-and-so could only see me now and share this wondrous sight with me!”
Nor is this instinctive craving for Sympathy absent in the mind of the poet who prefers to be alone with Nature; on the contrary, it is even deeper in his case. For to him Nature is personal; he